Tickets please. “What sort of party are you off to?”
Into one ticket booth and out of another. The station beeped with overhead voices announcing irrelevancies and souls busy but not rushed filled the bobbing view.
“Excuse me?”
A worker was insisting an answer out of Shay or Woid, whom had not quite come to terms with their new surroundings.
“We’re just meeting someone.” Shay answered first, bleary as Woid continued keeping an ear out.
“Well, shove out of my office, then. You won’t meet them in here.”
∞
Shay too kept an ear for any thunderous noise, having been shoved out and Woid stepped out in more mysterious fashion (much to the rolling eyes of the station worker). The engines of shuttles scraped out rackets, making slow their controlled descents, and an arguing group of passers-by made difficult their first moments listening. The two of them nodded knowingly at one another, and they began their separate routes to higher ground. Almost weightless robes and dark leathers followed them.
∞
Having ascended many stairs they were intercepted at a clearing where only a handful of souls there stood, surrounded by travellers trying to pay no notice by paying every wary notice they had. Monks cyclops and not were present, barring Shay’s path, as Woid had already stepped wherever and unseen. A dagger was pressed to her leathered neck:
“Lady Fate extends her gratitude to you, that once you were loyal and served well The Truth.” A Shadow of The Dam’e slithered: “You disgraced the contract you had and The Dominae wants you dead.”
“Who? And I doubt you’ve read my contract - but would you like to see it?”
Woid was giggling somewhere, the monks listening meditatively for his moveless movements, and the populace of travellers steered completely clear now. Slamming footsteps shook closer and closer: station guards waddling in with their stunning cannons poised, each wearing half a shuttle-worth of armour or more, and a forward movement of them stomped forth with hammers of order in hand.
∞
Shay umbra-stepped into her attacker’s darkness and they back into hers. To onlookers they were dancing, stepping into one another’s shadow repeatedly, perfectly vanishing into reappearances other there and here until Shay attained the upper hand. The Shadow dropped their dragger, grasping instead at their blood-spraying throat, writhing after thudding on the ground.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“See?” Shay showed the scroll to them as they were dying, theatrically to unsettle the foes she had yet to fight. “Two names. Lay’d Payn and Lady Fate both signed this. Though I suspect they are the same confused soul. Both desperate to forget the other.” She rolled it back up into her harness hidden, staring at the other Shadows where they hid, and at the monks as they prowled-channelling into their bestial stances. “This is my future you’re standing in the way of; my past I wish returned.”
Her mask was the last they saw. Thunder sounded amidst the melee, though Shay could not hear where from.
∞
Shay saw Woid waving on a higher platform, indicating the thunder growled and snapped from up there. She avoided most of her tricks and powders here, not wanting to hurt the guards or travellers. Once she had butchered into a bloody spray two more of ‘The Dominae’s’ shadows, the guards opened hail and laser-fire from their cannons. Shay and the monks made their escape, taking swipes at one another when they could or had to. The heavy guards’ backs widened into wings, and with sonic strangeness flew as chunks of armed metal around the station in pursuit.
∞
A shadow awaited around one corner, in two sword style as Shay once had been, combating now against her one sword and one dagger style.
“For The Violet Lineage!” and similar dead chants yawned from The Shadow.
Shay replied in kind to each attack, and the swords rang against a higher thunder. The Shadow’s blinding powder failed unexpectedly against Shay’s mask; designed against such things. The guards later found the Shadow, their head almost missing from their body. A dying monk laid there as well grasping beads, half in other dreams, wounds weeping with bubbling poison from many small cuts.
“Why have you got two heads?” One of the guards chuckled to another; a snapped wire lay at their feet.
All their armoured suits were unable to filter out whatever gaseous trap of Shay's they had sprung. Hallucinating sleepily.
∞
“These cakes that me and Serib had…” Woid tried picking something out of his teeth, peering through the doorway to a shop full of clothes: “Nuts or something. I like that shirt!” his chin lifted and he reappeared with it on.
Outside and inside the shop were dead monks and shadows, sporting more violet tones to their loyal raiment. His dagger nowhere.
“Dominae sounds a touch like Dam’e to me.” Woid called to Shay before she umbra-stepped into his living shadow. "And those guards are a touch posh. Where or when have we ended up..."
As Shay stepped closer to the entrance of the shop, thunder smacked out from it. Bodies rolled away with force and lights blinked out. Woid and Shay stood dizzily from the floor.
“Definitely the right place…” Woid groaned from his stitches as Shay grabbed his arm grinning behind her mask, pulling him through the shop’s entryway.